Madre Naturaleza

By Ryan Dunfee
Halloween is possibly my favorite holiday, offering the layman the chance to dress up and inhabit the personality of someone weirder, sketchier, more handsome, or more of a drunk than their usual persona. But this time it was Mother Nature, who donned her La Niña costume and came out as Madre Naturaleza, rolling into the Northeast like a gringo falling out of the front door of a Señor Frogs wasted on tequila – mis-timed and destructive, and with the bartender still glad they came and spent all their money.

Madre came in cold and spinning, dropping upwards of two feet across Southern New Hampshire and Western Massachusetts while throwing heaving, barreling waves at the New England seacoast. While fellow Powder.com contributor Tim Fater and I traded e-mails about what to do and where to go, I ultimately opted to space my radicalness out over two days, spending the first taking advantage of the one-day monster swell and surfing the only spot in an hour’s drive that might be sheltered from the raging Northwest winds, while Tim headed west to the seldom-shredded pitches of Berkshire East. Returning home to scour snowfall totals, my friend and Alpine-Live.com co-founder Ryan Denning and I decided anywhere with enough snow to ski would be worth it, and by sunrise yesterday morning we pointed the car Northwest towards Mount Sunapee, the site of some seriously random powder slayage during another freak storm last winter that was documented on on this very same site.

What we found wasn’t game-changing blower, but after the first few hundred feet helped me find my ski legs, the fact that I was linking turns, in powder, with some rhythm, not scraping rocks, and surrounded by blazing fall foliage managed to be just enough to push it to 9 on the scale of potential October epicness. If I’d been smart enough to pack a bottle of McGillicuddy’s, we’d have been at 10.